Interesting, thanks for posting that! One of the reasons I like this forum is because there are people running around on here who’ve read papers like “Salivary Digestion Extends the Range of Sugar-Aversions in the German Cockroach” and you get to talk to them for free.
So if I understand the abstract and skimmed paper so far, we’re seeing more saliva-based aversion to pure glucose because pure glucose is a superstimulus (the roaches still accept “complex glucose”), and human trap designs are fond of superstimuli, as cheap ways to radically increase the probability your trap works, so the traps are selecting for pure glucose aversion. Given how short insect reproduction cycles are and how many there are anyway, we’ll probably observe this kind of evolution everywhere, as well as every time we switch traps.
Interesting, thanks for posting that! One of the reasons I like this forum is because there are people running around on here who’ve read papers like “Salivary Digestion Extends the Range of Sugar-Aversions in the German Cockroach” and you get to talk to them for free.
So if I understand the abstract and skimmed paper so far, we’re seeing more saliva-based aversion to pure glucose because pure glucose is a superstimulus (the roaches still accept “complex glucose”), and human trap designs are fond of superstimuli, as cheap ways to radically increase the probability your trap works, so the traps are selecting for pure glucose aversion. Given how short insect reproduction cycles are and how many there are anyway, we’ll probably observe this kind of evolution everywhere, as well as every time we switch traps.